Gossip

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 500, 21 January 1949, Page 10

Gossip

ONDAY mornings have always been considered particularly suited to gossip from the time the women of the village gathered at the water-hole to beat their linen in company to the present day, and no self-respecting cartoonist would’ dream of allowing two females to say anything pithy over the back fence without lining in a couple of sheets and a pillow-case in the background. Miriam | Pritchett’s Monday morning series The Human Touch was nothing if not gossipy, and, siftce I myself am ag connoisseur of gossip, I use the word in no derogatory

sense. Take her last, "Elizabethan Antic," for example. This is the story of a beautiful young girl who marries a handsome young man and finally falls in love with another equally handsome young man whom she subsequently marries, the whole story being cunningly tied to the story of the "Elizabethan antic’-an antique couch previously in the possession of the second husband’s first love, and upon which the heroine, now an invalid, is forced to recline while her Lochinvar pursues, fairer and fleeter quarry. *This story has all the hallmarks of first-rate gossip. First, it is told as true. Second, it coricerns the upper classes. Third, there are wraiths of scandal drifting through it. Fourth, there is the strong suggestion of merited retribution in the heroine’s fate (in keeping with the folk-lore tradition, young Lochinvat gets off scot-free), Mrs. Pritchett’s voice was in perfect harmony with the county sétting of her story, and her ironic detachment echoed the parenthetieal "So she said" or "According to him" of washday tradition.